It's been a while! Our third term has been crazy busy over here, with more post audio work, lots of field recording, some on-set film collaboration stuff, Max/MSP classes and an animation I'm doing the sound for (with a few good friends) on the side. We've just passed a nice block of assignments, so I wanted to come up for air and post a piece of work before diving back in.

Game Audio II

Emotive Game Trailer Assignment: COD4

One of the realities of working at a small-scale game developer (or even some larger ones) is that if you're on-site as the sound guy, you'll occasionally get stuck with some non-developmental audio stuff to do. When the sounds have all been created and implemented and the game's headed for gold, your publisher will want promotional trailers - and you may be the guy to cut them.

For this assignment, we were to choose from a selection of popular game trailers (audio removed) and a handful of available library songs in a variety of genres, then cut, process and edit any number of those songs any way we saw fit to give some emotion to the moving image - accent cuts, create dips and valleys, all that good stuff. The artificial challenge here is that we were able to work only with the source songs as raw audio material, and couldn't bring in extra SFX to do impacts, bass dives or any other tricks we might want to use. We had to get resourceful.

In the end, I used bits and pieces from 5-6 of the potential songs to create the video below. Just a quick look at the original audio before we hit my edit:

It all took off from messing with the pitch of the DnB song and realizing it sounded like a pretty cool beat in and of itself. That track was also the major component of my SPFX during the intro soldier segment and the gunshot to the screen. Here's the final result: